I originally had 4 primary partitions on my laptop they were windows vista(primary),ubuntu 8.10(primary),swap partition,dell recovery(primary)
,F(logical)
I shrinked my F drive to install ubuntu 9.04 and I was successful but now my disk manager shows 5 primary partitions i.e. ubuntu 9.04 also as a primary partition ..I cannot understand how I can have 5 primary partitions when I installed ubuntu 9.04 as a logical partition .

From your description, you only had 3 primary partitions. If you installed Ubuntu as primary, that would be your 4th and final allowable primary.

but isn't swap also a primary partition.
plz help

What's the output of cfdisk?

#sudo parted

>p


post output

thanks for the description it says

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 197MB 197MB primary fat16
2 198MB 16.3GB 16.1GB primary ntfs
3 16.3GB 80.3GB 64.0GB primary ntfs boot
4 80.3GB 320GB 240GB extended lba
7 80.3GB 98.2GB 18.0GB logical ext3
8 98.2GB 101GB 2994MB logical linux-swap
5 101GB 206GB 105GB logical ntfs
6 206GB 295GB 88.5GB logical ntfs
9 295GB 320GB 25.5GB logical ext3

but why does the windows vista disk manager shows the other way?
Plz help

It either is a crappy program or you are misinterpreting what it says. It's impossible to have more than 4 primary partitions, one of which might be an extended partition.

Inside an extended partition you can have as many logical drives as you need.

In linux, this means that the four first numbers are always reserved for primary/extended partitions, and the first logical drive is always 5, even if you only have a single primary partition. For example, if your disk is /dev/hda and you have only an extended partition into it, then it will be /dev/hda1, and if you make drives inside that extended partition, then they will be named from /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6.... /dev/hdaN. That's true even if there's no /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3 or /dev/hda4.

As you can see, you've got 4 primary partitions. The last one forms an extended partition which consists of a number of logical partitions.

Thanks for the reply.
still can't understand the problem with vista disk manager
thanks again.

What fdisk or cfdisk or vista shows is a MSDOS partition table.
In it you can either have four primary partitions or
three primary partitions with one extended partition and it's logical partitions.